Forcing keywords into domain structure

[theshortstack]

Hi there,

Over the last few years, I've seen people structuring their site so that their main content is all housed in a folder named after the site's primary keywords.

For example, if I had some content about home insurance, normally naming conventions state that I might put the content at a URL such as:

www.mydomain.com/home-insurance

However, some sites, may change this structure to include their main keyword again in the URL string:

www.mydomain.com/insurance/home-insurance

The folder 'insurance' would normally hold the site's Sitemap to increase internal linking strategy too.

I'd be really interested to hear whether anyone has seen any serious benefits from re-structuring their site in this way? What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks,

[Catalyste]

As Axel and Acorn  I also think that you should leave the URL the shortest possible in terms of SEO. Also if you change the URL structure, the external links pointing to the old pages wont be updated automatically and will be kind of wasted.

[Autoschieber]

If there where no search engines would you do it?

This simple question often helps you with common sense. Dont't make the site (internal & external) too complicated.

[MSSTORAGE]

I'd always recommend that the navigation is useful to the user. e.g.

if your website covered other areas of finance then this would make sense:

finance.com/insurance/home-insurance/
finance.com/insurance/motor-insurance/
finance.com/loans/homeowner-loans/

but if you were adding it just for seo, personally i wouldn't bother. I'd go for

Insurance.com/home-insurance/
insurance.com/motor-insurance/

[theshortstack]

Hi Axel - thanks for the response.

What about if you're starting out on a new site though? Would you go with the amended URL structure or the more traditional one?

[Autoschieber]

I don't think it's worth the effort to change all the URLs...